Keith Morris: N.C. struggles with IT
Your Sept. 18 news story “North Carolina to privatize Medicaid” led me to recall the myriad problems the state has had with program management software, in particular the Computer Sciences Debacle of 2014 when the state elected to have its own “home-brewed” system and contracted CS to develop it. Hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on a system that never worked.
The majority of states were using a system developed at a fraction of the cost. And this was before the current complexity of the health care system.
Recent articles said that only 5 percent of state IT projects could be considered successful. The state obviously does not have the expertise to specify, hire contractors and oversee IT projects, yet continues to do so with little or no procedural change, e.g. check references, talk to other states, design better contracts that penalize contractors for botched implementations.
As a business owner faced with staggering health care premium increases and close to the highest state business taxes in the nation, I am furious. My (probably futile) advice: Wake up, North Carolina, put politics aside, do homework and act like a business.
Keith Morris
Fuquay-Varina
This story was originally published September 26, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Keith Morris: N.C. struggles with IT."